When Play Without Words was premiered back in 2002, it raised British dance theatre to a new pitch of sophistication. A study of sex and class in early 1960s London, it filleted elements of style and psychology from a kaleidoscope of period sources (including Joseph Losey's The Servant) and turned them into an hour and 45 minutes of tautly visualised storytelling. Ten years on, the structure holds just as tight, and the work looks very, very nearly as compelling as when it first appeared.

Lez Brotherston's design remains one of the most blindingly ingenious of his career. A simple double staircase and doorway transform into a Chelsea flat, a Soho strip joint, a gay pub and rain-slicked alleyways. Pitch-perfect costumes establish the social tenor of each character: rich bachelor Anthony, his posh fiancee Glenda, and the three "lower class" figures who prey on them: the sexually versatile Speight, the sinister manservant Prentice and housemaid Sheila.

All this is fleshed out by choreography that, as always with Bourne, is meticulously observant. Anthony is a hunched, self-conscious Englishman emerging into metropolitan grooviness, Sheila a graceless cockney with a disturbing sultry bloom. But the particular brilliance of the characterisation comes from Bourne's device of doubling or trebling the casting of each role.

In purely choreographic terms, this generates delicious possibilities – a drunken Anthony opens the door to his newly employed manservant and sees three Prentices, wavering in front of him. Its dramatic potential is even more profound. When Sheila and Anthony have (very erotic) sex on the kitchen table, they're watched throughout by their alter egos, Sheila calculating her advantage, Anthony wide-eyed and cringing at his own transgression. In a work about ambiguity and repression, this device is an ideal way for Bourne to choreograph layers of simultaneous emotion and reaction.

Perhaps, on a second viewing, it's a device that is also over-used. There are moments of emotional intensity that call for the more naked focus of a solo or duet; moments, too, when the rhythm of the story telling gets lost in structural cleverness. Yet a superb cast make these characters unfailingly real to us; Terry Davies's jazz score is both cool and dangerously hot. And out of the chaos of the ending, where we, as well as Anthony, lose track of all the different characters taking possession of his world, Bourne orchestrates a chillingly graphic image of mental and social breakdown.